WEST GERMANY: Krupp & the Jews

To “help heal the wounds suffered during World War II,” Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, sole owner of the billion-dollar Krupp industrial combine, agreed last week to pay up to $2,380,000 to former Jewish slave laborers. Under the agreement, negotiated with the same Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany that won a $6,430,000 settlement for former Jewish slave laborers from the I. G. Farben chemical trust in 1957, Krupp will pay 5,000 marks ($1,190) to any Jew who can prove he worked under duress for a Krupp enterprise.

During Alfried Krupp’s trial as a war criminal in -1948 (he was to spend 30 months in prison until pardoned), the U.S. prosecution charged that he “actively sought to employ concentration-camp inmates and for that purpose built factories near the camps of Markstaedt and Auschwitz.” Though witnesses said that 100,000 camp inmates and P.W.s worked in Krupp plants, no one knows how many were Jews. Of the Jewish slave laborers, an unknown number died in the Nazi gas ovens. In the whole federal republic, there are now only 30,000 Jews. Krupp officials estimate that there will be some 1,200 valid claims; the Claims Conference believes that there may be as many as 2,000.

One reason for Krupp’s gesture: he is hoping for, and will probably get, a year’s extension—or even a cancellation—of the Allied demand that he divest himself of all his coal and steel holdings by January 31.